Because individual differences research fails to confront the most basic problem of all in the scientific study of personality-that of providing an adequate framework for personality description-such research is fundamentalhj inadequate for the purposes of a science of personality. The author therefore proposes that a clear distinction be maintained between differential psychology and personality psychology and that individual differences research be recognized as relevant to the concerns of the former. An alternative to the individual differences paradigm, termed idiothetic, is suggested as a general framework for the scientific study of personality. Within this framework, the basic problem of personality description would be approached in an explicitly idiographic manner, while the search for nomothetic principles would center around questions of personality development. The Need for an Alternative to the Individual Differences ParadigmAs just mentioned, the most basic (though clearly not the only) problem for a science of personality

Within the introductory pages of most personality texts, one often finds some statement to the effect that consensus is lacking in the field on many issues. The mere existence of personality texts, however, and thus of an identifiable subdiscipline of psychology, suggests that at least some very basic concerns are shared by all or most personality theorists, concerns that therefore define the overriding (i.e., metatheoretical) objectives of the scientific study of personality. Based on his consideration of a wide variety of personality theories, Levy (1970) suggests that these basic concerns might reasonably be defined as follows:Colloquially, it might be said that in personality we are interested in learning the best way to describe what kind of a person a man is, how he got that way, what keeps him that way, what might make him change, and how we might use all this to explain why he behaves as he does and predict how he will behave in the future. (p. 29) This article is predicated on the assumption that Levy's remarks do indeed identify a set of basic concerns that are (and have long been) widely shared among personality theorists. With this in mind, I argue below that the individual differences research paradigm, which has thoroughly dominated empirical personality research throughout the present century, is fundamentally inadequate for the purposes of a science of personality. The argument, in a nutshell, is that the assessment of differences between individuals on various common attributes, and the study Reprinted from the A d c a n Psychologist, 36, 276-289. (1981). Copyright 0 1981 by the American Psychological Association.

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